The Grit in the Pearl by Lyndsy Spence

Author:Lyndsy Spence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

8

THE GOLDEN AGE

When Margaret and Charlie divorced in February 1947 they did so quietly and on the grounds of his constructive desertion. Although he agreed to the conditions of the divorce, it was against his will and perhaps something he came to regret, as a year later his love interest Lady Isabel Milles-Lade married Edward Stanley, the 18th Earl of Derby. Since their separation in 1943 this final step was a natural progression for Margaret, as she claimed she gave Charlie many opportunities to be a loyal husband. Her reputation remained unscathed: she had been married for fourteen years, was the mother of two young children, and, from an outsider’s perspective, she had tried her best.

Margaret’s status as a divorcee in the late 1940s offers a unique insight into social mores after the war, as the divorce rate increased between 1939 and 1945 and many post-war divorces were the consequence of hasty marriages, infidelity (58 per cent of divorce cases were filed by husbands) and incompatibility when men returned home. Margaret did not list Charlie’s adultery or unreasonable behaviour – the two things she accused him of and the vital reasons, from her point of view, why her marriage failed. Desertion was a respectable cause for divorce, making it look as though Margaret had been another casualty of wartime circumstances and a victim of her husband’s behaviour. The Daily Mirror embraced the changing social attitudes and reported that a divorce between two unhappy individuals should be granted: ‘Even the most conservative figures of the legal profession today would not deny that our divorce law contains much that is stupid, vexatious and unfair.’ It was a subject that divided opinions, and Mr Justice Denning claimed that a divorced couple with children ‘have no absolute right to decide the future of their children … they have disabled themselves’.1 The Church of England criticised the decline in moral standards and the collapse of family life, and in America the former president, Herbert Hoover, suggested that couples should understand that ‘war relaxes moral standards on the home front and that this imperils the whole front of human decency’.2

None of the aforementioned were apparent in Margaret’s household, and the children, she said, never suffered as a result. Nor did she exclude Charlie from family events; he was invited to tea in the nursery,3 to accompany Margaret and the children to pantomimes, and to help decorate the Christmas tree. It was, after all, an era when upper-class children were accustomed to absent parents and their nanny taking responsibility for their upbringing, and so, as Margaret attested, Charlie’s absence from their home life did not trouble Frances and Brian. The children would have also been used to not seeing either parent during the war years, when they were billeted to the countryside, and Brian, a mere baby at the time, knew no different.

This was particularly true when Margaret, dressed in Molyneux’s post-war fashions of a long skirt and peplum jacket, left Frances and Brian at home and sailed to New York on the Queen Mary.

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